I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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The reason is: jobs represent a lower and lower proportion of hardware production. And hardware represents less and less of the value-added in a product.There are profound implications in that statement.

Let me give you a few examples of where the jobs dilemma really lies. A couple of months ago Malcolm Frank of Cognizant told me his company had 100 recruiters out on the road in the U.S. but they had difficulties finding the people they needed: people with a mix of business and IT talent who could talk strategy to clients and prospects.

Here are two further examples that underline the fact that the jobs problem is partly a talent problem that no educational institution has a handle on.

The first interviewee is the CIO of a major media organization. The biggest problem he faces? He needs people who are capable of reskilling on a weekly basis, should Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google make any changes to their platforms, or if a new social marketing product come onto the market, or if the company sees an opportunity for a new app to differentiate its offering.

Those people are very hard to find even though his company has an interesting brand — not quite Facebook or Google, but close.

The second comes from the auto industry where, my interviewee told me, the balance between software and hardware engineers on any given infotainment project is now 50 software engineers to one hardware engineer. The difference between before and after is huge. Hardware engineers used to dominate these projects. So hardware does not create jobs like it used to, nowhere near.

The jobs growth continues to be in software. And the competition for software talent is global. Every company I have interviewed so far has offshored software jobs, seeking to find the best talent, wherever it might be. As far as I can see nothing is being done at a policy level to address that drain.

It’s hard to disagree — with over $100 billion in the bank Apple could do more for America. But the reality of today’s economy is that the knowledge-intense roles that we’ve said for a decade would become critical, the ones often centering on software, are indeed critical.

The absence of global supply is holding companies back. And so too is the lack of experience in this fast changing environment. The necessary problem-solving skills are difficult to teach, and the experience is often impossible to acquire because so much is new.

But these are still solvable requirements: make the labor market more fluid, allow people to expose their skills development more publicly, teach people to package their business experience better, make people better developers of their own narrative, better managers of their core problem solving skills rather than their exact implementation skills, accept we are constantly in beta mode, and teach people, quickly, to function in conditions of unprecedented uncertainty. Tough though it might sound that would tee people up for jobs that are already out there and still being offshored.

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Allow me some observations from a few decades of practicing engineering in the US:

- employers have complained about “shortages” of engineers for all of that time, even during the depths of the 2002-2003 tech meltdown, even as they decimated their workforces during the 80′s and 90′s in some avant-garde “right-sizing” quest.

- Wages have barely kept pace with inflation during my career. Yes, there have been bright spots in some places or times, such as the tech bubble. But those are an aberration in the larger scheme and those gains have since been lost.

- the much maligned “offshoring” can help in some cases but it can also hurt: A lot. Call it sour grapes but my observation is that the companies doing this most aggressively have been (and are) the ones failing in the market place. Now they are adding distance and time-zone offsets to an obvious internal communications problem. The results have not been pretty.

Overall, the obvious solution is to pay more and attract talent to where it’s needed. But this obvious solution has successfully eluded our lavishly compensated executives for decades.

I think you are spot on in your analysis of what is going on in the management of large corporations. The problem is corporations are allowing managers to use fiefdom building and book keeping to determine strategy. Cooking the books is not just a problem from the obvious thieves who are stealing. It is also a time honored “management” tool. The largest power struggle that ever broke out at Microsoft was the fight to reconcile each divisions bookkeeping so each “boss” couldn’t emphasize his own accomplishments and motivate his people. One of the real strengths of the secrecy that Steve Jobs used to manage Apple was it kept the managers from redirecting the innovations which would negatively impact their own division.

We don’t just have a compensation problem, we have a collaboration problem. People will work for slightly less money for more stability, support and input into the growth of the company. The flip side of this is they will abuse this power if not kept form getting away with it.

Regarding your comment: “accept we are constantly in beta mode, and teach people, quickly, to function in conditions of unprecedented uncertainty”

We don’t do that very well at all in this country. And we don’t teach it early and hone it as people grow. Life has always been a beta project with people constantly learning and adapting but recently we feel we need to be protected from everything and that everything needs to be certain and safe. Parents, mostly acting out of love, try to protect their children from everything instead of building coping and problem-solving skills; any perceived threat or source of unhappiness must be eliminated. Schools are not preparing the workforce you’re talking about either – uniformity and mediocrity is the mode of the day. Colleges fail to prepare people well also. Many businesses have to do remedial training for many university graduates.

We’re not a hardy country anymore and the adaptability you’re saying we need comes from hardiness, risk and failure and rising again with new insight and lessons learned and applied. People frightened by uncertainty are not likely to blaze new frontiers or build resilience.

I’ve got a couple questions to ask. One is about outsourcing and the other is about that comment of yours regarding change.

Do we really need to have the whole offshore-vs-onshore debate? I think it’s just better if everyone just left it all to who strikes the winning combination of cost and efficiency. Whether you’re an offshore or onshore professional, you win so long as you got the skills without a painful price tag. No more contests. No more arguing.

Call me naive but I expect a strong, well-informed justification for saying that a person’s geographical location and their national currency should be a significant factor. Playing the “Made in America” or “Made in China” card won’t cut it for me.

For the second question, do you think such a dynamic change will give jacks-of-all trades the advantage? I notice the idea that the expert’s role is diminishing is starting to trend.

I believe that bringing manufacturing to any country will make some boost on the economy, so people should look more on the brighter side. No matter how much we debate on the topic, some family/Individuals (*Common citizen) will experience a positive financial turn-around from this.